Gettysburg, JFK, Camelot and Democrats’ Camel-nots

On today’s sesquicentennial of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and before Friday’s 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, Americans see their respective legacies betrayed by (mostly northern) liberal Democrats waging war against what Camelot’s Arthur and our Founding Fathers stood for.

Thanks to the courage and vision of President Abraham Lincoln and the Union troops that responded to his call to arms, the last best hope of man on earth survived the war of Southern aggression, violently launched against it first at Fort Sumter. The road to that survival began when Robert E. Lee’s Army of Norther Virginia was decimated by Union troops by the time the three-day Battle of Gettysburg ended on July 3, 1863 and Ulysses S. Grant’s 47-day siege gave the Union Vicksburg and control of the Mississippi River on Independence Day morrow.

In his address over four months later, and 150 years ago today, Lincoln hearkened back four score and seven years to the beginning of our revolutionary experiment in self-government conceived in the Liberty of free men equal before the law. The Great Emancipator dedicated the cemetery for the fallen and his efforts to an American commitment to continue the quest for a more perfect union.

The quest that followed, despite its fits and starts borne mostly by Blacks and poor Southern whites that never owned slaves, astounded the world and set a standard of liberty, equality, prosperity and charity unmatched in the recorded history of mankind.

In many ways our America quest based upon shared Judeo-Christian values, the rejection of ruling class privilege, and the liberty of individuals to pursue happiness as free people unburdened by tyrannical despots, both secular and religious; resembles the legendary quest of legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table to preserve their way of life at Camelot.

Soon after cold warrior and supply-side tax cutter, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas 50 years ago this Friday, his grieving First Lady complained that her husband had not “died for civil rights” but had instead been killed by a “silly little Communist.” And for the next 50 years the Democrats that survived Jack re-invented who he and what Camelot really were in order to justify an assault on the exceptional America they inherited so that it could be fundamentally transformed into one they prefer.

Witness Obamacare, communism and its socialistic approximations, and try to tell the victims forced to live under it and them and tell me dying at the hand of Lee Harvey Oswald was not for civil rights.

Yes, the President Kennedy that called Coretta while her husband was writing a letter from a Birmingham jail, and who denounced Jim Crow legal segregation laws and denials of voting and other rights, was a then-rare Democratic Party champion of civil rights. But it was Republicans that freed the slaves and tried to pass civil rights laws that were blocked by Democrats for 100 years.

But Lincoln and Kennedy understood that there was more to civil rights than freeing black folks so that a paternalistic federal government could direct every detail of our lives including which doctor we could see.

President Kennedy proposed the first significant tax cut since the New Deal had dealt a raw-90+% tax-rate-deal to entrepreneurs and job creators. When he denounced Jim Crow, he did so thusly:

“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.”

Would the Democratic Party that has waged war on the South, men, football, the family, school prayer, marriage, babies in the womb and an inadequate founding document of mere “negative liberties”; tie civil rights to the Bible and the dead Constitution they loathe? No, and neither would Democrats laud an Arthur’s Camelot that venerated Judeo-Christian and Roman rule of law values.

Instead they invented a new Camelot in their own-non-JFK-image that is actually a Camel-not of government of, for and by the people; but rather of government by a Chief Executive and bureaucratic minions that dictate what we can eat, drive, live in and dig out of the land and sea for our prosperity. They reject constitutional rules of law in favor of incomprehensible and voluminous regulations or executive fiats from on high. No law is settled except that Obama can change it unilaterally minute by minute. So Atlas Shruggs and half the nation gets handouts from Uncle Sam as their daddy and mommy. How can anyone plan and invest in a business in this environment. And it is our civil right to feed, clothe and house ourselves.